


Bretherin Kin

by bioticgoddess



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 21:54:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13984086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioticgoddess/pseuds/bioticgoddess
Summary: This is what I’ve always seen in the Steve/Bucky dynamic both on screen and in print. There’s a brotherhood that comes out of being friends, being in the shit they’ve been in that’s not love but it’s certainly not just friends anymore. It’s family. It’s turning into twins even though you’re not related.





	Bretherin Kin

Describing his relationship with Bucky hadn’t always been difficult. Since waking up in the modern world, however, it had been a clusterfuck. Some people wanted to cram them into whatever binary they could. Others simply scoffed at the pair and wrote them off as somehow unnatural. What no one, at least no one outside their friends, wanted to hear was the truth. Was the world that had always described them:  _Brothers_.

Steve had been orphaned at eighteen. Too old then to be a Ward of the State but not old enough to really, what did they call it – adult. But there was Bucky, who always had his back and was included him in everything. At least in the stories, if nothing else. They’d been friends for as long as either could remember - though Bucky’s memory was questionable at best these days.

Steve looked down, the journals, like the one he’d found on top of the refrigerator (and the one now in his hands) showed a disjointed memory. One where everything was somehow familiar and made sense, but for no reason that Bucky could understand. At least now from what Steve had read anyway.

He’d spent two years trying to find him; the brother thought long dead on the slopes beneath the freight rail. The friend who protected him. Who encouraged him to run - even though Steve never listened. He sighed, “My stupid brother.” It was the most accurate descriptor he’d ever found to use about the pair of Brooklyn Boys.

Flipping through the journal - he’d only really read a page here or there - he sighed and shook his head. It felt wrong to invade Bucky’s mind like this. That’s what it was for Steve after all. Or at least what it felt like. With another sigh he stopped on the first page of the book. Under the heading  _14 May 2015 - First Memory?_  was a cut out from one of the papers about the Triskellion attack. It was a photo of Steve, in his full Captain America suit, laying unconscious on the banks of the Potomac. Under it, written in all capital block letters, were the words:  **MY BROTHER**  and a split arrow that pointed to both Steve’s name and his face.

He sighed, closing the black leather bound book, “At least he remembered that.” It was easy to talk to Bucky about what they knew: Like that Steve and Peggy hadn’t ever gotten into what the modern world called the “official” category. That it killed Steve not to know what would have happened if they’d lived out their lives as normal men after the war instead of frozen. Could he and Peggy have really made it? What would his children be like? Would the super soldier serum in his blood have affected them?

On the other side, Bucky hadn’t left a girl behind, he’d said that it wasn’t fair to anyone on the Home Front. Granted, he was a shameless flirt but there wasn’t anyone he’d connected with in a serious way. And he refused to talk about what happened when HYDRA would wake him up - the killings, the missions, anything they’d made him do. What he had mentioned would center on the brief assignments to train the girls in the Red Room - and that had only been the years around and including Nat’s class. When he did join Steve in talking about children and families, he’d referred to himself as broken.

Even before the two became soldiers, they had lived through what PTSD did. In their childhoods, no one had been equipped to deal with it. Men were expected to be men and women were expected to stand by them. The children, they knew, were left out of this equation. They’d seen classmates, and now the grandchildren thereof, dealing with what it mean to be a combat veteran. To see and do what they had done.

But unlike most, even now, they had each other.

  
Steve had been dealing with it longer than most, and it seemed to affect him least out of them. He had nightmares, yes, but mostly about what he’d lost. The people he couldn’t bring back. And the things he’d seen that defied explanation.

The pair had walked into a concentration camp during one of their chases after HYDRA. All of the Howling Commandos, now most long dead, had been sick. They saw what could only be described as the worst of humanity. Steve and Bucky, however, wouldn’t see the worst of that until they entered the modern museums. Saw what other liberated camps were like - and compared to the lilttle one they stumbled on, many were infinitely worse. But Bucky had said to him once that he could sometimes smell the camp. At least when memories surfaced.

It was like the things Sam had once described about his time in the Middle-east.

But Steve always listened. And Bucky returned the act in kind.

“Brothers,” he muttered, looking down the Wakandan corridor. “Maybe here we can find some peace.”

Papers slapped against his head. “Gimme that back,” Bucky said, slapping Steve again with a stack of letters, all rubber-banded together. He was referring to the journal, still sitting on the Blonde’s lap. Steven hadn’t exactly asked to thumb through it.

Oddly relieved, he handed it back. “T’Challa gave me your rucksack,” he said, nodding to the black backpack and not wanting to admit that’d he’d delved into the book even slightly. “What’s that,” he asked quickly.

“Mail call,” he chuckled, “Ah just like back in that London Pub. Only less booze and no piano.” He tossed the assault stack to Steve. “Natasha and that Clint guy are getting very good at these clandestine mail hand-offs,” he said. “Even got a hefty couple stacks for Scott and Wanda.” Sam and Steve always had mail, unlike Clint they couldn’t exactly slip out and go visit any secret families.

He started, watching Bucky head for the door, “You enjoy this don’t you?”

Bucky laughed, one of his old laughs that made Steve remember nights camped out in the French and German forests with the Howling Commandos. Or trying not to embarrass either of them in front of a pretty girl (or two). “It’s fun,” he continued, “Wanda lights up like a Christmas tree, Sam actually shares the gist of some of his letters, and Scott’s like a teenage boy. It’s small but I feel like being the messenger,” he tapped a stack of letters with Wanda’s name scrawled across them, “is like.” He stopped and closed his eyes for a moment, “It’s like I’m me and I have a family again.”


End file.
